Jan Blommaert (Tilburg): The Rhetorical World of George W. Bush. From Digital Culture and Education, a special issue on harnessing digital technologies to challenge the dominant HIV and AIDS paradigm. A radical idea: What if we could make terrorism uncool? Cognac’s identity crisis: Wayne Curtis on how the liquor’s marketing success among both rappers and codgers has blinded consumers to its subtler pleasures. An interview with Peter Dreier, author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. Why do conservatives hate public transit? In a word, because it’s public. Female beauty is often defined by the Western fashion elite in Milan or New York, but more and more German magazines are speaking out against it. The U.S. government is a sham, the Federal Reserve is running a secret bond market, global finance is controlled by an “upperworld” of rogue black-ops fixers, and other things that Sam Israel, the Ponzi schemer who cheated investors of $450 million and faked his own suicide, truly believed. A long love affair with magazines: Samir Husni, aka Mr. Magazine, sees a bright future for the objects of his affection.

A new issue of Amsterdam Law Forum is out. Susannah Camic (Wisconsin): Everything is Tax. Elitism in online dictionaries: Free dictionaries on the internet are often bland and incomplete, while those that are complex and exhaustive require a credit card — quality comes at a price. If you think Mitt Romney is too mild, too "golly gee," too Mormon, to survive the shark tank of a modern presidential campaign, his answer is Eric Fehrnstrom. From From n+1, of the 5 million books held at the New York Public Library’s main building, only about 300,000 were requested last year; that means that the rest of them just sat around, taking up space in one of the most prized neighborhoods on the planet. Osama Bin Laden’s papers show he wished Obama would continue Bush’s “war on terror” (and more). From The Washington Monthly, predatory lending still poses a systemic risk to the economy; will Obama's new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau succeed in taming it, or will the agency be strangled in its crib? Mark Judge, now at RealClearBooks, is something of a book snob, but dislikes a lot of people who identify themselves as book fanatics.